How are you thinking about durability and specifically, how are you programming with that idea of building durability in Masters athletes, particularly in mind? What are you doing differently, if anything? How are you thinking about it as a coach?

Yeah, the workouts change primarily because the focus of these workouts is longer sessions.

And whatever that means for the athlete.

Longer session for some athletes means an hour and a half.

For other athletes, it means six hours.

So it depends on who we're talking about or what long means.

But the idea is that we start off in the first, let's say, hour of the workout, and we're going to create some fatigue.

from

What else should we be thinking about when we're working on creating a workout program for doing endurance events or just trying to stay healthy as we age as retired endurance athletes?

Yeah, trying to get the balance right is really critical.

The way I work around this for athletes is I talk about a training routine that's designed around making sure we get adequate hard training, but also adequate low intensity training.

And I call that five plus two.

uh it's very simple five days a week the athlete works out easy low intensity one of those days could be a day off even two of those days could be a day off but they're so they're low intensity they're really low in that case but five days a week are easy and two days a week are hard the two days a week that are hard are separated by at least two days So it could be like Wednesday, Saturday are hard days or Tuesday, Friday.

But somehow you have to get this organized such that you've got time between those when you're going to work on low intensity training.

So that gives you two to three days between the high intensity workouts to do low intensity training, which is primarily just lots of zone one and zone two.

So you know, kind of figure out that you said the five, two for the cardio training, how do you fit the strength training and the mobility power? I know it's individualized, but what have you found overall for age over 50?

in terms of train, in terms of training, lifestyle, mindset, whatnot, to have pushed out this surprise, quote, unquote, further down the line?

Yeah.

Well, yeah, there'd be a couple things.

One is that y- o- one, one of the things I've learned as I've gotten older is that you're more susceptible to injury.

That's obvious.

And I've made two mistakes along that line in the last, what, five, s- six years.

I've made two mistakes along that line.

So why is that important?

Mm-hmm

... 'cause it involves a lot of zone one and zone two training, especially zone two.Um, we'll come back to this a little bit later on probably 'cause I've, I've got some things that we can talk about in that regard also.

Yeah.

But, um, the idea is you gotta have endurance before you can have durability.

So you've gotta get to the point where a long workout does, not at, not at race pace or race power, just a long workout, long, easy workout becomes second nature to the athlete.

That's gotta become the first step in improving durability.

Mm-hmm.

Oh, wow.